Islam and Deliberative Democracy

Theories of Islamic Shuracracy (a theory of political system in Islam) on the one hand and Deliberative Democracy (a theory of political system in the West) on the other, can be considered as the main outcomes of recent intellectual developments in both Islamic and Western thoughts. This article, in addition to elaborating on, and comparing of these theories, seeks to reconsider the relationship between Islam and Democracy in order to propose the idea of compatibility between Islam and Deliberative Democracy. For the author, these theories are compatible in the sense that they accept the process of “deliberation” in making the main political and social decision. The adherents of these theories stress on consensus and mutual understanding instead of majority vote as the necessary criteria of legitimacy. These similarities rises the main question of this paper: What is the main cause of these similarities? Answering to this question, this paper tries to explain the recent intellectual developments in the Islamic thought in understanding Religion and in the West though in understanding Reason as the main epistemological resources of them.